I have a soyo motherboard with a promise IDE/Raid controller. I have the Ultra Family IDE drivers installed (latest). My Liteon 40125S is on IDE3 on the mb. My primary and secondary slots are taken. The problem I am having is that about 50% through my burn it starts flashing orange and red, so it is having trouble staying at 40X. It does just fine until about 50%. I started having this problem before so I reinstalled windows and that fixed the problem. It worked for about 1 month and now the same thing. I tried deleting the drivers for the IDE and letting them reinstall. I tried formating my hard drive and reinstalling windows (didn’t work this time) and I tried defraging my source drive. I downloaded the newest VIA 4in1 drivers also. It does the same thing with easy cd creator and CDrwin. There is no way to see what mode I’m in in device manager. This only shows primary and secondary IDE (which are DMA). I downloaded Nero and tried the CD Speed program and here is what I got:

It does seem you’re in DMA mode, your test results ended at 39.77x, that is damn close to 40x. The problem is because you’re only using a 53 minute cd to test. Try using a cd that is filled with ~700mb of data, then see what happens(a stamped cd, as opposed to a cdr, might also be slightly faster). The high burst rate of 20mb/s also shows you’re in DMA.

And about the LED’s flashing during the burn, that’s most likely due to high CPU usage, or your HD’s not feeding enough data to the drive for burning.
We’ll need a little extra info to see what’s wrong with that. But your drive seems to be working fine in DMA mode.

Ok new information. I opened task manager when burning a CD. Sure enough my total cpu usage slowly creeps up to 100% by the time I’m half way through the disk. I closed everything I could think of. Should I be having this problem with this system. Seems like it should be fast enough. Thanx for the help!

In fact, my overall cpu usage starts at about 60 and ends at 100 when I hit 50% of my copy. Now when looking at cdrwin.exe. It starts at 7% and works its way to 50-57% maximum. Where is the other 50%? Everything else is 00 or a couple percent.

Little confused. Do I need more ram? If this is the case why did it seem to work fine in the past?